Arm and Packet work to speed Armv8-A access for developers

The Open Source community has been busy at work targeting Arm based infrastructure platforms as evidenced by the tens of thousands of packages already available via traditional distribution channels from Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, SUSE, fedora, CentOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Alpine Linux, Arch Linux, NGINX, Ceph, MongoDB, OpenJDK, Golang and others! There’s still demand for many more packages that users want to see running in the data center on Arm-based infrastructure. To satisfy that demand and future innovation there’s a need to enable developers to bring additional software to market easier and quicker.

Arm is committed to supporting Open Source efforts by empowering open source developers with the resources necessary to efficiently target Arm-based infrastructure, ensuring access to increased capacity and diversity of hardware accelerates developer’s ability to meet enterprise-grade requirements for data center workloads. We’re constantly seeking new ways to help open source developers and partners take advantage of the innovative capabilities of Arm-based solutions, and bring those solutions to market faster. We’re excited to announce that we’ve teamed up with Packet, the leading provider of automated bare metal for developers, to make it easier for developers to build and test their software on a variety of datacenter-grade machines.

Through this partnership Packet will provide free on-demand access to Armv8-A systems from Cavium, Qualcomm, and others to open source developers and commercial software developers. Arm is augmenting this initiative by funding a small group of engineers at Packet who will engage deeply with the software community around Armv8-A to ensure efficient access and utilization of these new resources.

Committed to the open source developers community

Packet’s services are already popular among developer communities, examples of those already using Packet resources include Elastic, Docker’s LinuxKit team, Golang, Resin.io and CoreOS. Resin.io recently published a blog titled “Docker builds on Arm servers: you’re not crazy, your builds really are 5x faster” and Elastic are quoted as saying “Elastic has been an early beneficiary of the WorksOnArm infrastructure for our open source Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, Kibana), X-Pack, and Elastic Cloud offerings,” said Drew Raines, lead engineer at Elastic. “Our ability to easily deploy physical Armv8 servers for intensive testing has accelerated our progress immensely.”

In another example of Packet’s commitment to the broader developer community, they recently announced a contribution to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The Community Infrastructure Lab that Packet is enabling provides provisioning of bare metal infrastructure in mere minutes, enabling on-demand access to high performance compute and storage nodes in over 15 locations worldwide.

The WorksOnArm partnership is just the latest step in our continuing commitment to driving efficient development. This partnership is a logical extension of existing developer resources provided by Linaro via the Developer Cloud. Packet’s core business delivers on-demand compute and connectivity at the end of an API. In addition to providing direct access to bare metal the WorksOnArm partnership will enable Linaro to add capacity to the Developer Cloud by virtualizing Packet hosted hardware providing additional capacity, diversity and flexibility of resources to the Arm ecosystem.

A Rich Online Resource for Developers and End Users

Packet also hosts a public source of information at WorksOnArm.com to help end users and developers quickly understand and contribute to the available ecosystem for powerful Armv8-A processors. As part of this partnership Packet has recently re-launched this resource to make it easier to explore, navigate, and contribute ecosystem information. WorksOnArm.com will evolve over time to provide a rich centralized catalog of software components allowing developers and end users to efficiently access the information they need.

Additional Resources

The WorksOnArm newsletter provides a weekly round-up of relevant ecosystem activities. Back issues are available via the WorksOnArm Blog, you can also subscribe to receive the weekly newsletter via e-mail at that same location.

Linaro has established three Developer Cloud facilities: one in Cambridge, UK; one in Austin, Texas; and one in Shanghai, China. The Developer Cloud is built around a combination of ARM SoC vendors’ server hardware platforms, emerging cloud technologies, and many Linaro member driven projects, including server-class boot architecture, kernel and virtualization. The Developer Cloud is based on OpenStack, leveraging Debian, CentOS, Ubuntu or RHEL as the underlying cloud OS infrastructure.

Linaro also produces an Enterprise Reference Platform that provides developers with a fully tested, end to end, documented, open source implementation of boot firmware, kernel, a community supported user space and additional relevant projects for Arm based infrastructure. More about the latest release can be found here: Linaro 17.08 Release.

Earlier this year, Arm also introduced the Arm Infrastructure Developer Community (AIDC). This valuable resource helps developers connect with peers, get informed, and jump-start project development. It provides all the information needed about the hardware, software and the networking stacks to go with them. It also offers system integration help for developers looking to try their solutions out on Arm.

Interested in Arm architecture for High Performance Computing? Then check out the HPC portal for details of the rapidly expanding ecosystem.

Visit us at the Open Source Summit, LA, 11-13 September

Arm is playing an active role in engaging with our partner and developer community. We’d love to hear from you so if you have questions or would like to get involved, please stop by and visit us at Open Source Summit, North America in Los Angeles, September 11-13. You can find us at Booth 212.